Live in the USA? Criminals may have your personal info

Does this mean things like bank account info, credit card info etc. were also stolen?

 

Orwell was off by a few decades, and also incorrectly characterized Big Brother as a government institution and not the government/commercial cooperative that is evolving. Any private detective worth his salt can fully mine ChoicePoint’s database, either directly (with a paid ChoicePoint account) or through intermediaries. Now we see that criminals have been data-mining ChoicePoint's database for more than a year using fully paid ChoicePoint accounts. Lovely.

There is no privacy when such companies are given a free hand to gather and disseminate personal information at will. Unfortunately, such companies have become the darlings of federal agencies tasked with criminal enforcement and national security, especially since 9/11, so don’t expect any meaningful attempts at the federal level to rein-in such companies.

Attorneys general in 38 states have joined an open letter to ChoicePoint, demanding that the company do for their states' residents what it did for Californians — inform anybody affected by the security breach that they may be vulnerable to identity theft.

I hope this fiasco results in tens of thousands of lawsuits (or a few large class action lawsuits) and ultimately brings ChoicePoint to its knees.